§ 123. This latest word of naturalistic ethics has not won acceptance as the last word in ethics, and this in spite of its indubitable truth within its scope. For the deeper ethical interest seeks not so much to account for the moral nature as to construe and justify its promptings. The evolutionary theory reveals the genesis of conscience, and demonstrates its continuity with nature, but this falls as far short of realizing the purpose of ethical study as a history of the natural genesis of thought would fall short of logic. Indeed, naturalism shows here, as in the realm of epistemology, a persistent failure to appreciate the central problem. Its acceptance as a philosophy, we are again reminded, can be accounted for only on the score of its genuinely rudimentary character. As a rudimentary phase of thought it is both indispensable and inadequate. It is the philosophy of instinct, which should in normal development precede a philosophy of reason, in which it is eventually assimilated and supplemented. [Sidenote: Naturalism as Antagonistic to Religion.] § 124. There is, finally, an inspiration for life which this philosophy of naturalism may convey--atheism, its detractors would call it, but none the less a faith and a spiritual exaltation that spring from its summing up of truth. It is well first to realize that which is dispiriting in it, its failure to provide for the freedom, immortality, and moral providence of the more sanguine faith. "For what is man looked at from this point of view? . . . Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant. . . . We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable